Innovation Can Be Green!
It will be too once the current cultural paradigm shift is complete. This is the paradigm shift from physical presence to digital or conceptual substance. It is the shift that means we used to own a physical CD but now we own the song be it on a CD or on an ipod.
Because of this change, innovation can be green. We don’t need stuff anymore; we are looking for experience. As a result we can have less stuff and more experience. In such a world innovation doesn’t have to lead to more physical things and therefore more waste.
I came across this post on WorldChanging:
“One of the fundamental insights that’s helping us re-imagine our lives in a brighter, greener cast is that most of the time, we don’t want stuff, we want specific needs fulfilled or experiences provided; that, as Amory Lovins puts it, we don’t want refrigerators, we want cold beer — if there were a better, cheaper, cleaner way of providing cold brews, most of us wouldn’t shed a tear to see our fridges go. Recognizing that this is true for nearly every product in our lives is revelation number one.” – Read the full article by Alex Steffen, Service Envy: Branding Experience Instead of Stuff.
A final side note. When I was in school as Simon Fraser University’s Interaction Design Program, I worked as the Creative Director on a project called Digital Nowhere which explored this paradigm shift. Digital Nowhere is multimedia poetry that explores what is meant by the notion of “meaningful experience” and what does this mean in the virtual context? Increasingly, our possessions do not have or require a physical presence, but instead they exist as a digital substance.
